A Parent's Guide to the Best Kids' Comics

September 15, 2012

Librarians and bloggers for School Library Journal's Good Comics for Kids, Robins and Wildsmith share detailed information on 100 core graphic novels for K-12, plus 750 readalikes. This is a first-of-its-kind book for parents, specifically, and so it's organized by age group, contains educational tie-ins and caveats, and reproduces generously sized full-color pages to convince those "they're not real books!" snarkmeisters that comics provide appealing and useful content as well as actual words to read and literacy benefits. There's even a short section about graphic novels on parenting, like Bunny Drop. Every comics-loving librarian will notice favorite titles and series missing, but this isn't a book for librarians or educators, even though there's a short bibliography for these two groups. For families, this will work just great as a core list, although I would wish for more titles with prominent characters of color. VERDICT This necessary guidebook for parents belongs in all public libraries; buy an extra for readers' advisory. Note that librarians and educators must augment kid-ages graphic novel selection through a wider range of sources that include, for example, more titles with nonfiction content and literary adaptations.--M.C.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.